Featured Poet

Eleni Sikelianos

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( New York, New York )

NOTE: The poems found in these Featured Pages are from Sikelianos' forthcoming collection The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls. The book, a 2002 National Poetry Series selection, will be published by Green Integer/Sun & Moon Press (Summer, 2003).

Melospiza melodia, Mon livre d’oiseau

In this landscape:
scattered stations from which a pair or pairs of eyes might observe
the scorpion’s “bright hooks”
silhouettes of migrating birds against the moon; a field where land-
scapes diverge; winter’s closing of lakes coming on, and birds
between their breeding regions. Between the hills, a confluence, crumbling
The Grey-cheeked Thrush
takes off
from home to head
toward other homes. Something distills, heavy
industry; hinted-at
hit and runs untangling, hawking questions of the soul’s
defunct & tabulating high
TV-tower corpses; unravel this guttural; our capacities to home
at different elevations and hours of the night; cars speeding
pleasure at our heels, our shoulders
invented in curves, birthmarks
lit up

Dreamt My Teeth

dreamt my teeth were white as light
I’ve got a flag on my back; make it be
Not civic, but this meritorious monarch with wings
Of finely woven golden thread just as
The hairs on the human head
Weave a lazy bracelet beneath the rock
When the human is dead

Dream Poem Two

dreamt our city was destroyed, and we were there
while the huge, bullet-shaped bombs
whistled and smashed into buildings,
lights crashing around & above
us; dark, night-time sky;
the end of our days in
cafés, in beds, in each
others’ arms, in safety,
in dark or in light in libraries,
in markets with bright things all
around; the only thing left
in the dream is to make love
in a light-filled gutter; so let
Odysseus’s foot fall
back in the basin tonight, the bright
beads of water
bathed in blonde air

Selections from "The Bright, the Heavy" (a series from the forthcoming collection) are found on page 2